A gifted teacher, a great debt

Published 1:06 am, Wednesday, June 29, 2011

I'll never forget that particular seizure. Harry was walking away from me after a quick goodbye kiss, and then his backpack went still. In the middle of the street, he was frozen.

It wasn't a big seizure, perhaps 25 seconds, but a long time to be standing in a street. Time passed. He unfroze, continued walking and climbed on the school bus.

It was my turn to freeze. My son was going to school?

He just had a seizure. How could I possibly let him go?

Those were some of the toughest days I've been through in my seven years as a mom. On that particular morning last October, we had only had a formal diagnosis for two days. It was still sinking in: epilepsy, absence seizures.

Kindergarten had been a nightmare. We didn't understand Harry's struggle. We had no idea that he was losing pieces of his day to seizure. He was missing direction and didn't realize it himself.

His teacher became frustrated, the tension between them grew and it wasn't long before Harry no longer wanted to go to school. We considered taking him out. We talked with counselors; we tried different ways of discipline. We pushed, coaxed, cried and kept on going. The end of the school year was an incredible relief.

We had a lovely summer, but spent many hours concerned about September.

First grade. It didn't take long for a similar pattern to appear in Harry's behavior, but this time we saw something else as well. He had moments of what we thought was daydreaming, something we'd seen before, but it began to happen more often.

I remember him drawing at the table, crayon color selected and then his hand frozen in midair. It took him a moment to respond, to come back to us. When asked what happened in those moments, his answer was an embarrassed response of "just dreaming a bit." We had no idea that we were witnessing absence seizures.

In October they hit hard. In a few days he had multiple seizures, lasting longer than ever. They exhausted and confused him. His pediatrician guessed it; an EEG confirmed it: Harry had epilepsy.

My husband and I didn't have Harry until we reached 40. He is our only child. Feel free to call us overprotective; we just nod our heads and smile. Harry didn't have a babysitter until he was five -- leaving him behind was something we just never thought of.

My ability to send Harry to school during the early stages of seizure discovery had everything to do with one of the most remarkable teachers at the Dorothy Nolan Elementary School in Saratoga Springs.

This year, my son learned to read and to work through math problems. But even more, Mrs. Valentine embraced my son's descriptive term "silly brain" and suggested a secret code so he could let her know a seizure had occurred. In the meantime, she taught him about pilgrims, the solar system and Martin Luther King.

Between these lessons, she offered him suggestions to gain control of his emotions while in school, methods he even took home. Harry learned to write about ideas discussed in her classroom, while he and Mrs. Valentine became closer, sharing stories of their own food allergies and the stuff neither of them could eat.

In the early days, before we had seizure control with meds, Mrs. Valentine would take a minute of her lunch time or while the kids were at gym or art, and send me an email saying, "He's OK today."

In those days, I was glued to my computer, researching epilepsy while worrying about the seizures that Harry was having at school. Those few precious words in my email were a large part of my ability to stay calm.

The morning after his first EEG, Mrs. Valentine and the school nurse, Lisa Adelson, met with me before class to talk over our situation and form a plan. They had one day's notice for this meeting.

Mrs. Valentine asked for literature. The teacher became the student; we would learn about epilepsy together. Time and again, she went beyond her responsibilities to help my family. Harry, who had been reluctant to return to school in September, was sad on his last day of class.

He will miss Mrs. Valentine's gentle caring way, and the many lessons beyond academia.

We have an understanding of what was in the way of Harry's learning and that alone has made a tremendous difference in how this school year ended. But it's only a small part compared to what Mrs. Valentine did to make this year remarkable. She is a gifted teacher and we will be forever in her debt.